Jason Lutes

Berlin: City of Stones presents the first part of Jason Lutes' captivating trilogy, set in the twilight years of Germany's Weimar Republic. Kurt Severing, a journalist, and Marthe Muller, an art student, are the central figures in a broad cast of characters intertwined with the historical events unfolding around them. City of Stones covers eight months in Berlin, from September 1928 to May Day, 1929, meticulously documenting the hopes and struggles of its inhabitants as their future is darkened by a glowing shadow.

City of Stones

Berlin Book One

"Originally serialized in the comic book 'Berlin,' in issues 17 through 22, published by Drawn & Quarterly"--Copyright pag

City of Light

Berlin Book Three

Marie

In the final part of this trilogy, we see the beginnings of how Berlin succumbs to Nazism. The characters that we've accompanied throughout the trilogy are all deeply affected by history, with families splitting between left (communists) and right (Nazis), Jews being victims of hate crimes and people watching in horror as their former friends and lovers support fascists. 

I'm glad that people in Germany are going to the streets in masses, protesting the renewed rise of fascism in our government.

A beautifully drawn graphic novel depicting Berlin between the wars. The plot is a little bit convoluted due to the many different characters, but overall I think it's more about the atmosphere than the plot anyway.

The second installment of the epic historical trilogy The second volume of Jason Lutes's historical epic finds the people of Weimar Berlin searching for answers after the lethal May Day demonstration of 1929. Tension builds along with the dividing wall between communists and nationalists, Jews and Gentiles, as the dawn of the Second World War draws closer. Meanwhile, the nightlife of Berlin heats up as many attempt to distract themselves from the political upheavals within the city. The American jazz band Cocoa Kids arrives and quickly becomes a fixture. The lives of the characters within Lutes's epic weave together to create a seamless portrait of this transitory city. Marthe Muller follows her lover Kurt Severing as he interviews participants in the May Day demonstration, but she moonlights in the city's lesbian nightlife.Severing acts as a window through which the political shifts within the city and its participants can be seen. As with Berlin Book One: City

City of Smoke

Berlin Book Two

This graphic novel is set in 1930 and displays Berlin during an election year. It's scary how up to date to current (2016) events in Germany it is...

"If there was ever any doubt of a graphic novel’s ability to achieve a high level of storytelling, this book blows it away."—Newsday "Astonishing in its scope, breadth and execution."—The Independent Twenty years in the making, this sweeping masterpiece charts Berlin through the rise of Nazism During the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the masterworks of the graphic novel golden age. Berlin is one of the high-water marks of the medium: rich in its well-researched historical detail, compassionate in its character studies, and as timely as ever in its depiction of a society slowly awakening to the stranglehold of fascism. Berlin is an intricate look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of its citizens—Marthe Müller, a young woman escaping the memory of a brother killed in World War I, Kurt Severing, an idealistic journalist losing faith in the printed word as fascism and extremism take hold; the Brauns, a family torn apart by poverty and politics. Lutes weaves these characters’ lives into the larger fabric of a city slowly ripping apart. The city itself is the central protagonist in this historical fiction. Lavish salons, crumbling sidewalks, dusty attics, and train stations: all these places come alive in Lutes’ masterful hand. Weimar Berlin was the world’s metropolis, where intellectualism, creativity, and sensuous liberal values thrived, and Lutes maps its tragic, inevitable decline. Devastatingly relevant and beautifully told, Berlin is one of the great epics of the comics medium.

Berlin

rumbledethumps

An amazing book. So huge in its scope and so well done in its storytelling and illustration. This book is bound to be on a short list of classic graphic novels.

Gavin

Brilliant evocation of Weimar Berlin: the dark lightness, the inertia. You worry when it focusses for dozens of pages on art students trying and failing to speak philosophy, but later we get the beautiful mental babble of a whole streetcar of workers, the silent struggle of a boy selling red newspapers badly, ze cabaret.

Nelson Zagalo

"Berlin" (2018) trata o surgimento do nazismo na Alemanha dos anos 1920 e parece ter sido criado por forma a espelhar o momento que vivemos de pós-crise financeira 2008 com as consequentes polarizações políticas do tipo BREXIT a chegarem aos EUA, América do Sul e Ásia. Contudo, quando Jason Lutes começou a produzir esta novela gráfica, vivia em Seattle e corria o ano de 1996, vivia-se a primeira grande euforia financeira das Tecnologias de Informação, que viria a ditar o estouro das chamadas dot.com em 2001. Essa primeira onda tecnológica trouxe, desde logo, à tona enormes desigualdades sociais o que acabaria por interessar Lutes em tudo aquilo que tinha acontecido em Berlim:

"I was living in Seattle, where the World Trade Organisation protests had happened, and there was already strong friction between the internet millionaires and the less fortunate. I was relating my experience in the moment to [what was going on in] my imagined Berlin, so I didn’t only think of the subject in a bubble to be looked at from a distance. All the same, I could never have predicted what would eventually come out of all of that.” The Guardian, 30.9.2018

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Tendo em conta os 20 anos investidos por um criador na produção de uma obra, só muito dificilmente ela poderia ser de todo irrelevante. Quando alguém investe uma parte significativa da sua vida na criação concreta de algo, na prossecução de um sonho com princípio, meio e fim, é importante que paremos e tentemos ouvir, neste caso ler e ver. Se mais nada aqui houvesse, que não é o caso, toda a experiência criativa de anos e anos acumulada e sintetizada numa obra acabada serviria o nosso deslumbre e admiração na tentativa de tentar compreender porquê. Tem de ser algo muito intenso, minimamente relevante, para garantir a atenção de alguém ao longo de tantos anos. Mas se depois essa obra é publicada por uma grande editora e é recebida com rasgados elogios pela crítica, então nada fica a faltar, apenas a nossa própria experiência da mesma.

[imagem]

Começo por dizer que "Berlin" é mais novela do que novela gráfica, no sentido em que usa uma estrutura narrativa muito mais comum na literatura do que na banda desenhada. Falo em concreto do entrelaçamento de vários enredos, com cerca de 40 personagens envolvidas, ligados pelo espaço de uma cidade, mas essencialmente pelos interesses familiares e sociais das personagens. Apesar das 560 páginas, são muitas personagens, e nem sempre é fácil distinguir quem é quem, o que obriga a uma atenção redobrada, também menos comum nas novelas gráficas. Uma das razões para este efeito é a escolha pelo preto-e-branco que torna mais difícil diversificar e estereotipar os personagens para facilitar a compreensão do leitor. Contudo, acredito que o desejo de Lutes era este mesmo, tal como acontece nos romances mais elaborados, de levar o leitor a sentir todos aqueles personagens como amalgama emocional e social que forma a cidade, e não como meras entidades discretas. 

Posso dizer que conhecia minimamente o surgimento de Hitler, mas só agora me dei conta que conhecia muito mais sobre o pós-1933, ano em que foi eleito, sendo esse o ano em que termina esta narrativa. Ou seja, Lutes não se focou na explicação do modo como Hitler conduziu o seu império do mal, mas antes no modo como a cidade de Berlin, a Alemanha, permitiu a chegada de alguém como Hitler ao governo. Nesse sentido, aprende-se muito a ler "Berlin", nomeadamente sobre a interação com a Revolução Russa de 1917, e a tentativa de estabelecer na Alemanha um sistema idêntico. Ou seja, não foi apenas um problema do Crash das Bolsas e da grande Depressão de 1929, a política alemã estava ao rubro e a crise financeira veio apenas dar o empurrão final. Impressionou-me ainda descobrir que Goebbels, o maior arauto de Propaganda de sempre, esteve presente desde o início, e que sem ele Hitler muito dificilmente teria chegado ao poder.

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Em termos de experiência, a leitura começa lenta, muito pela densidade mas também por algum desconhecimento nosso do contexto, mas vai ganhando tração e suga-nos para dentro no final. Depois de terminar o livro, ainda dou por mim a regressar àqueles espaços, a ouvir aqueles personagens. Acredito que Lutes poderia ter trabalhado melhor a expressão dramática de alguns personagens que apesar de densos fica sempre um pouco distantes de nós. Mas a componente gráfica é excecional, contribuindo imenso para construção do imaginário da cidade e das vidas daquelas pessoas. Claro que ajuda o facto de estarmos a ler uma obra destas em 2020, em plena crise política internacional, e ver tantos paralelos com a realidade que vivemos, como diz Lutes “It’s a horrible kind of good fortune”.

Publicado no Virtual Illusion:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...

Berlin Ciudad De Piedras / Berlin City of Stones

Eugenia Andino

Que sí, que es un clásico... pero no sé, lo fragmentario de las historias no me termina de llegar. Mucho monólogo interior, muchas ganas de que por fin pase algo.

Best of 2018 nods from the Washington Post, New York Public Library, Globe and Mail, the Guardian, and more! "The magic in Berlin is in the way Lutes conjures, out of old newspapers and photographs, a city so remote from him in time and space... [Berlin has] an ending so electrifying that I gasped."—New York Times Book Review During the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the masterworks of the graphic novel golden age. Berlin is one of the high-water marks of the medium: rich in its well-researched historical detail, compassionate in its character studies, and as timely as ever in its depiction of a society slowly awakening to the stranglehold of fascism. Berlin is an intricate look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of its citizens—Marthe Müller, a young woman escaping the memory of a brother killed in World War I, Kurt Severing, an idealistic journalist losing faith in the printed word as fascism and extremism take hold; the Brauns, a family torn apart by poverty and politics. Lutes weaves these characters’ lives into the larger fabric of a city slowly ripping apart. The city itself is the central protagonist in this historical fiction. Lavish salons, crumbling sidewalks, dusty attics, and train stations: all these places come alive in Lutes’ masterful hand. Weimar Berlin was the world’s metropolis, where intellectualism, creativity, and sensuous liberal values thrived, and Lutes maps its tragic, inevitable decline. Devastatingly relevant and beautifully told, Berlin is one of the great epics of the comics medium.

Artas Bartas

Was für ein reizendes Buch! Ich habe das in zwei Tage gelesen und hat jede Minute davon genossen. Bleierne Stadt enthält eine Menge Charaktere, was macht es schwierig sie richtig zu entwickeln. Doch was dem Roman an Psychologie fehlt, macht es mit ihrem politischen Kommentaren wett. Sehr empfehlenswert.

Berlin Book One City of Stones

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